Historical Figure

Carl Gustav Jung

Also Known As Jungian The adjectival form, as in Jungian analysis and the Jungian reading of alchemy.

Scientists, Physicians & Natural Philosophers

The Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology and introduced concepts such as the collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation, and synchronicity. He studied alchemy, Gnosticism, astrology, and mythology as symbolic maps of the psyche transformation. His engagement with the esoteric gave it new intellectual respectability in the modern age.

Facts

Identity

Also Known As

Carl Jung 1

Also Known As

Jung 1

Gender

Male 1

Classification

Nationality

Switzerland 1

Origins

Place of Origin

Kesswil, on Lake Constance 1

Defining Moment

His break with Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis in 1913, after which he developed his own analytical psychology. 1

Publications

Notable Publication

Psychological Types (1921) and the posthumously published Man and His Symbols. 1

Attestation

Historicity

Historically attested 1

Life

Lifespan or Floruit

1875 to 1961 1

Manner of Death

Died of natural causes 2

Terminology

Term Coined

Coined or popularised the terms collective unconscious, archetype, individuation and synchronicity. 1

Learn More

Why a Psychiatrist Spent Thirty Years on Alchemy

Jung's engagement with esoteric material was neither a hobby nor a late aberration; it was where he looked for evidence. His argument required that certain symbolic structures recur in people who could not have learned them from each other, and alchemy gave him a large, obscure, historically remote body of imagery to compare against the dreams and fantasies of patients who had never read any of it.

His reading of it is a reading, and its status should be clear. Jung treated the alchemical opus as a projection of the individuation process, the nigredo as psychological dissolution, the coniunctio as integration of opposites, the philosopher's stone as the realised Self. This was hugely productive psychologically and it is contested historically. Lawrence Principe and William Newman have argued in detail that the alchemists were doing laboratory chemistry, that their allegorical language often encodes specific material operations, and that the wholly spiritual reading of alchemy is largely a nineteenth-century invention that Jung inherited and made permanent. Both things can be true: Jung may have been wrong about what the alchemists were doing and right that their imagery maps something real about psychological change.

The Red Book, the record of his own visionary experiments between 1913 and 1917, was withheld from publication until 2009 and reframed him when it appeared, it shows the concepts arriving through active imagination and personal crisis rather than through clinical observation.

His conduct in the 1930s remains genuinely disputed rather than settled. He took the presidency of the reorganised international psychotherapy society under German influence in 1933 and published remarks distinguishing Jewish from Germanic psychology that were antisemitic in effect and were read as such at the time. He later called his position a misjudgement. Whether it was accommodation, opportunism, or naivety about what he had joined is argued in the literature and no consensus exists.

The Red Book Stayed in a Vault

Between 1913 and about 1930 Jung conducted on himself the experiment on which, he later said, all his work rested. In the crisis years after the break with Freud he deliberately induced waking fantasies, descended into them, and engaged their figures in dialogue: Elijah and Salome, the horned Philemon who taught him that the psyche's figures are autonomous, the dead who returned demanding answers. He recorded the visions in black notebooks, then transcribed and expanded them into a folio volume of his own calligraphy and painting, Liber Novus, the Red Book: gothic script, illuminated initials, mandalas and monsters in saturated colour, a medieval manuscript made by a twentieth century psychiatrist about his own interior. The method he distilled from the ordeal, active imagination, became a cornerstone of his therapy; the book itself he showed to almost no one. He worked on it privately, left it unfinished in mid sentence, and after his death in 1961 the family eventually placed it in a Zurich bank vault, where it lay for decades while scholars negotiated.

Publication came only in 2009, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, and the facsimile became an improbable bestseller. Its release rebalanced Jung's whole biography: the psychology of archetypes and individuation can now be read as the theoretical residue of a visionary practice Jung conducted first and theorised after, which is precisely the order of operations he always claimed.

Connections

Associated With

Alan Watts

Watts met Jung in Europe in 1958 and engaged Jung's depth psychology directly in Psychotherapy East and West (1961), reading Buddhism, Taoism and yoga alongside Jungian and other Western psychotherapy as parallel routes to the same liberation from a falsely bounded self.

Source Alan Watts (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Alchemy

Bollingen Foundation

The Bollingen Foundation took its name from the Swiss village where C. G. Jung built his tower, and its Bollingen Series published the English Collected Works of Jung.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Psychology of Religion

The practitioner the atlas records for this discipline.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Sigmund Freud

Jung was Freud's designated successor in the psychoanalytic movement until their break in 1913, after which their accounts of religion diverged completely.

The Secret of the Golden Flower

Jung's extended psychological commentary on Wilhelm's 1929 translation shaped the text's Western reception

Popular Derivatives of This Work

The Caregiver

The twelve-archetype set used here follows the popular branding scheme associated with Carol S. Pearson and Margaret Mark, not any list Jung published. Jung described archetypes as structures of the collective unconscious and never fixed them at twelve.